Within the prior art, it is known to provide many types of features for telephony endpoints such as telephone sets. This is true of IP telephone sets (also referred to as IP hard phones). Such features are provided by the programming or re-programming of the computers that control the telecommunication switching system providing the service for the IP telephone. Even though such software systems are often touted as being flexible and easily adapted, in general, this is only true for small software programs and those controlling non-real time events. For large software systems controlling real time processes, such as telecommunication switching processes, these systems are not particularly flexible. The reason for this inflexibility is that the software systems are quite large, each portion of the system is time critical, and reliability is of the utmost importance. It is common place for software that runs on a personal computer to use a message when necessary for the user to reboot the system or for the system to automatically reboot itself. However, in real time systems, such as telecommunication systems, the software must run unattended and maintain reliability through a variety of conditions. The processes that are gone through to assure this reliability and speed of telecommunication software systems makes these systems expensive to develop and very prone to fatal errors if small changes are made within the software. In addition, such software systems are developed over many years, beginning with a common base which advances with further development. It is not uncommon that the developers of the software systems are no longer employed or working on these systems. Consequently, the people that would be making the modifications are not aware of all of the considerations that were used to cause certain sections of the program to be written in a certain way. Further, telecommunication software systems are controlling a large number of telephony endpoints and if the software system fails, then a large number of users would not be provided telecommunication service. In addition, whereas it may be possible for the manufacturers of a particular telecommunication system to reprogram the software systems, it may not be advantageous for the manufacturer to do so if the new feature would only be utilized by a small percentage of the manufacturer's potential customers. On the other hand, if it was possible for a third party software developer to develop the program, it might be quite economical for the third party developer to develop such software. This assumes of course that the third party software developer has lower development costs. In addition, if the program developed by the third party software developer would only effect one or a small set of telephones then the requirements for reliability of the software system are not as great.